Journal
of the Short Story in English
Les Cahiers de la nouvelle
58 | 2012
Special Issue: The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith
Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “Pomegranate
Seed”
Gina Rossetti
Publisher
Presses universitaires d'Angers
Electronic version
URL: http://jsse.revues.org/1254
ISSN: 1969-6108
Printed version
Date of publication: 1 juin 2012
Number of pages: 189-200
ISBN: 0294-0442
ISSN: 0294-04442
Electronic reference
Gina Rossetti, « Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and
“Pomegranate Seed” », Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 58 | Spring 2012, Online since 01
June 2014, connection on 30 September 2016. URL : http://jsse.revues.org/1254
This text was automatically generated on 30 septembre 2016.
© All rights reserved
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “P...
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in
Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and
“Pomegranate Seed”
Gina Rossetti
1
Examining Wharton’s short fiction, one attends to the complex and nuanced
representations of marriage. In many ways, these representations focus on how the
conventions of marriage hold female characters to standards of behavior that are not
applied to male characters. In her short story “The Other Two,” (1904) the twice-divorced
Alice Haskett Varick Waythorn comes to be the object of judgment, if not of scorn,
because “society has not yet adapted itself to the consequences of divorce, and that till
that adaptation takes place every woman who uses the freedom the law accords her must
be her own social justification” (434). Alice’s third husband determines whether or not
she will be accepted in society. And while her adaptability and unflappability are
precisely what he finds attractive, these qualities also serve as the criteria for his
judgment of her. Waythorn’s chuckle at the story’s conclusion, when all Alice’s spouses—
both current and former—gather to be served, seems to suggest a new social order in
which a woman’s ability to shed her past is directly related to her new husband’s ability
to “discount it.”
2
Such “discounting,” while certainly laden with markers of both male privilege and
condescension, appears not to be the issue at stake for the new marriage depicted in
“Pomegranate Seed.” In this 1931 short story, Mrs. Kenneth Ashby’s spectral power seems
to control the outcome of her husband’s second marriage. The source of that power lies in
the regular letters, sent to and read by her husband only. Her will is done beyond the
grave, and the letters appear to trigger the husband’s departure. While Charlotte has
consented to live in her husband’s home replete with his late wife’s furnishings, Kenneth
cannot “discount” his first wife’s original claim. With the myth of Persephone as a
framing device, the story seems to act out two simultaneous impulses: first, Elsie’s hold
suggests that Kenneth cannot shed his past and enter a new relationship—and the
Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012
1
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “P...
reader’s attention is repeatedly drawn to the shrine-like appearance of his home.
Secondly, the invocation of Persephone suggests that the institution of marriage will be
loosened, and that Kenneth will be wedded to both women. So, when both stories—“The
Other Two” and “Pomegranate Seed”—are read together, the very definition of marriage
is called into question.
The Ties that Bind
3
As Mary Papke argues in Verging on the Abyss, “The Other Two” fits within the context of
Wharton’s “early stories [that] point to the concept of marriage as business, men as
dealers in the property of women, as well as the conventional belief that a man’s status is
reflected by the appearance and manner of his wife and material possessions” (116). Such
an approach deftly contextualizes the short story in the early Wharton canon echoing
Thorstein Veblen’s examination of women as commodities in Theory of the Leisure Class.
Veblen said that the “practice of seizing women from the enemy as trophies gave rise to a
form of ownership-marriage, resulting in a household with a male head” (19). The wife
became a trophy of male competition, and her very existence showed that she was an
object of exchange, whose worth was determined by the market. In “The Other Two,”
Alice is a twice-divorced mother of a twelve-year-old daughter whose value derives from
Waythorn’s ability—“in the Wall Street phrase” (434)—to discount these liabilities. Or so
he initially believes. Alice’s value also comes into play through Waythorn’s ability to
construct her as part of his own narrative: in the story’s opening paragraphs he
symbolically connects a thoroughly modern New York divorcee with the Madonna and
child. As he waits for Alice, who is checking on her sick daughter, he muses that, for him,
Alice’s “affection for the child had perhaps been her decisive charm” (433). This prompts
him to picture her “bending over the child’s bed” and to think “how soothing her
presence must be in illness: her very step would prognosticate recovery” (433). Whether
Alice actually performs these duties is not known because we have access only to
Waythorn’s fantasy, which initially places Alice in a maternal context. Juxtaposed to this
scene, however, is one that foregrounds the characteristic Waythorn both prizes and
loathes in Alice: her elasticity, or more precisely, her ability to move away from a
distressing circumstance, or perhaps even from one marriage to the other without
complications or visible marks of injury. Waythorn reasons that “when she had done all
she could for Lily, [Alice] would not be ashamed to come down and enjoy a good dinner”
(435). We never gain access to Alice’s ideas about motherhood because Waythorn controls
the narrative gaze.
4
Waythorn admires his wife although “he knew what was said about her; for, popular as
she was, there had always been a faint undercurrent of detraction” (434). Alice “had a
way of surmounting obstacles without seeming to be aware of them, and Waythorn
looked back with wonder at the trivialities over which he had worn his nerves thin”
(435). This approach contains the seeds of its own contradiction. It also underscores the
extent to which Alice’s “value” depends on external appraisal. In other words, stories
about her previous marriages are fodder for gossip and diminish her value in view of any
future marriage, thus undermining the very source of her material existence. Waythorn’s
assessment of Alice’s elasticity, then, not only oversimplifies the ties that still bind her to
her previous husbands, it also suggests that her value is important only if it enlarges his
property holdings. Still, when Alice emerges from Lily’s room, “though she had put on
Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012
2
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “P...
her most engaging teagown she had neglected to assume the smile that went with it”
(435). Her expression runs counter to the narrative he constructs, which prompts him to
do a number of things that will diminish the value of his new possession.
5
Rather than consider that a divorce provides women with severed ties in name only,
Waythorn regards the tethers that still bind Alice to Haskett and Varick as an albatross
around his neck, or more precisely, as his personal ghost story. The reader learns that
Waythorn “always refused to recognize unpleasant contingencies till he found himself
confronted with them, and then he saw them followed by a spectral train of
consequences. His next days were thus haunted” (447). While not strictly a ghost story, it
is curious that in “The Other Two,” Waythorn’s response to Alice’s previous marriages is
evoked in terms of the ghostly. Alice’s previous unions haunt Waythorn rather than Alice,
and allow him to imagine himself as the duped party. Wharton critiques Waythorn’s
assumptions and conclusions, and his later conversations with Alice become instruments
for these “ghosts,” and in particular Haskett, to exert new power over her.
6
The haunted marital past is the focus of Waythorn’s concern in “The Other Two,” and the
same—even more intense—feelings are depicted in “Pomegranate Seed.” This story uses
the ghost story and Elsie’s seemingly powerful hold over Kenneth as an attempt to expose
as unnatural the limitations imposed by conventional marriage. Wharton accomplishes
this by representing the male character as the one who is trapped by his past. Using
Wharton and Codman’s The Decoration of Houses (1897), I will argue that the décor of the
Ashby home—and Charlotte’s adjustment to it—serves as a metaphor for the perpetuation
of the past in the present and the manner in which the rules and conventions of the past
remain unquestioned. In many ways, Charlotte’s “challenges” have less to do with the
letters and more to do with the home itself—preserved in the manner that Elsie Ashby
desired—thus preventing Charlotte from imagining a new beginning. This symbolic tie to
the past plays itself out in Charlotte’s desire to solve the mystery of the author of the
letters and her husband’s disappearance, and suggests the extent to which she believes
problems can be identified and transcended by the application of time-tested rules. By
depicting a male victim, Wharton gains greater freedom to delineate the confining nature
of the conventions of marriage.
7
Wharton’s first mention of the impact of the ghostly over the living is to be found in The
Decoration of Houses. In a discussion of room decoration, the authors say that “it must
never be forgotten that everyone is unconsciously tyrannized over by the wants of others
—the wants of dead and gone predecessors, who have an inconvenient way of thrusting
their different habits and tastes across the current of later existences” (18). In
“Pomegranate Seed” this problem reveals itself on two levels: first, with the preservation
of the home’s out-of-date decorative style, which stands in marked contrast to the city’s
modern architecture, and second, with Charlotte’s perception that the letters themselves
are missives from the late Elsie Ashby that bind Kenneth to the past and prevent him
from embracing the present with her. The story appears to follow the advice about front
entrances offered in The Decoration of Houses: “while the main purpose of a door is to
admit, its secondary purpose is to exclude.” Codman and Wharton go on to say that “the
hall or vestibule from the street should clearly proclaim itself an effectual barrier. It
should be strong enough to give a sense of security” (103). At first, the Ashby home
conforms to these recommendations because it stands between Charlotte and the city:
She turned her back on it standing for a moment in the old-fashioned, marbleflagged vestibule. […] the sash curtains drawn across the panes of the inner door
Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012
3
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “P...
softened the light within to a warm blur through which no details showed. […] this
veiled sanctuary she called home always stirred her profoundly. (678)
8
The decoration of the entrance harks back to an earlier decade, and its emphasis on
exclusion sets the stage for Charlotte’s outsider status in the Ashby home: “since the
death of Kenneth’s first wife, neither the furniture nor hangings had been changed”
(678). Charlotte’s friends tell her that Elsie’s ghost will continue to preside over the home
and Kenneth’s heart: “he’ll never let you move an armchair or change the place of a lamp.
[…] and whatever you venture to do, he’ll mentally compare with what Elsie would have
done in your place” (682).
9
Several salient points emerge from the juxtaposition of The Decoration of Houses and the
story’s opening pages: Victorian decorative conventions are presented as a respite from
the modern era’s jarring sensibilities. Both texts confirm the realities that reveal
themselves to Charlotte, but a closer examination raises questions about the character’s
assumptions, exposing them, and her, to critique by the reader. For while the vestibule
may offer shelter to the home’s inhabitants, Wharton and Codman also argue that “the
vestibule should form a natural and easy transition from the plain architecture of the
street to the privacy of the interior” (104). In the short story, there is no such easy
transition, suggesting the extent to which Charlotte is not simply ensnared in decorative
preferences of the past, but also in the restrictive social mores of the Victorian era. While
Charlotte imagines that it is the “soulless roar of New York, its devouring blaze of lights,
the oppression of congested traffic, congested homes, lives and minds” (678) that
threaten her existence—if not her sanity—the real danger lies in her belief that her home
functions as a haven protecting her from the chaos outside: “in the very heart of the
hurricane she had found her tiny islet—or thought she had” (678). And for her friends
who initially counsel against marriage to a widower, “none of these forebodings had come
true” (682).
10
And yet “Pomegranate Seed” is a ghost story with the second Mrs. Ashby presumably
haunted by a past that terrorizes her in the present and threatens her future. While
Charlotte may not believe her friends’ cautionary comments, she crafts her own ghost
story, one that seemingly threatens her marital happiness. Crucial to Charlotte’s tale of a
deceased wife who haunts her former husband’s new marriage is that she must possess
some degree of narrative reliability. However, the evidence of Kenneth’s unfaithfulness
consists only of stolen glances, hasty assumptions, and problematic interpretations of
non-verbal behavior, all of which are parodied1 and reveal more about Charlotte’s
inability to imagine a more modern conception of marriage than it does about Elsie’s
demands on Kenneth. Charlotte sees Kenneth’s disappearance at the end of the story as
irrefutable evidence that her suppositions are correct. The husband’s loss of agency and
the Persephone myth paradoxically allow the story to suggest the possibility of an
alternate form of marriage in which multiple partners coexist.
Unraveling Old Entanglements
11
For readers of “The Other Two,” it is important to see that Waythorn comes to envision
the ties that bind Alice to her previous husbands not only in terms of ownership and
diminished value—and thus threats to his status—but also as a source of sexual anxiety.
At the beginning of section two, for instance, Waythorn sees Haskett’s impending arrival
at the house as a violation of his domain: “as his door closed behind him he reflected that
Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012
4
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “P...
before he opened it again it would have admitted another man who had as much right to
enter it as himself, and the thought filled him with physical repugnance” (437). In his
discussion of this scene, Kiran-Raw suggests that “Waythorn and Haskett’s rivalry over
Alice turns into an intensely personal relationship with a homosexual undercurrent”
(40). Consequently, he interprets Waythorn’s disgust as an example of same-sex erotic
panic. I would contend instead that Waythorn’s disgust derives from the realization that
male power and privilege imply access to his home. In this particular case, Haskett’s legal
right to see Lily grants him entry into Waythorn’s life as well as into Alice’s. Haskett’s
presence illustrates that other men have claims to Alice that might be exercised at any
time, thus vitiating Waythorn’s authority and even his manhood. However, in a later
scene, where Alice confuses her second husband’s habits with those of her third husband
and adds cognac to Waythorn’s coffee, Waythorn’s authority is criticized and distanced.
What is striking about the scene is not so much that Waythorn has previously observed
that Varick prefers cognac with his coffee and understands whom Alice has in mind, but
that the error occurs as Waythorn gloats about his appropriation of Alice:
As the thought of Haskett receded, Waythorn felt himself yielding again to the joy
of possessorship. They were his, those white hands with their flitting motions, his
the light haze of hair, the lips and eyes . . . .
She set down the coffee pot, and reaching for the decanter of cognac, measured off
a liqueur glass and poured it into his cup. (440)
12
Alice’s error reminds Waythorn that she has served other men and his needs are not
unique.
13
While Waythorn initially sees Haskett as an invading force, his approach to Varick differs,
particularly as Varick and Waythorn “had the same social habits, spoke the same
language, understood the same allusions” (444). Custody rights introduce Haskett into the
Waythorn home, but chance—connected to speculation on Wall Street—accounts for
Varick’s entry. Using what would now be termed insider trading information, Varick
earns $100,000 from a stock “tip” and needs assistance investing the money. Because
Varick cannot work with his usual broker, who is convalescing, he must seek out
Waythorn’s expertise. Waythorn agrees to assist Varick because while “he did not care a
farthing for the success of Varick’s venture, the honor of the office was to be considered,
and he could hardly refuse to oblige his partner” (441). His meetings with Varick become
opportunities for Waythorn to revise his narrative of Alice and to conclude that she has
used her marriages as attempts at social-climbing. He arrives at this conclusion after
hearing a chance comment made by Varick that confirms rumors Waythorn had already
heard but presumably discounted, “that a lack of funds had been one of the determining
causes of the Varick separation” (441). Waythorn then traces Alice’s trajectory: “he could
fancy how pretty Alice must have looked, in a dress adroitly constructed from the hints of
a New York fashion-paper, and how she must have looked down on the other women,
chafing at her life, and secretly feeling that she belonged in a bigger place” (444). Alice’s
desire to please becomes the instrument of her upward mobility. Interestingly, her
twelve-year-old daughter is also described as “too anxious to please” and she “does not
always tell the truth” (446). Her behavior appears to be inherited from her mother, thus
once again legitimizing early rumors about Alice.
14
While Alice’s accommodation to each succeeding husband elicits Waythorn’s
condemnation, he serves as the instrument that provides the means to make that
accommodation possible. Even though Waythorn laments his hauntings by these
Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012
5
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “P...
“ghosts,” the actual spectral horror comes to be visited upon Alice—who if she is to insure
her present marital happiness—must adjust to Waythorn’s demands. It is at this point in
the text that the use of business language with respect to Waythorn’s marriage
intensifies. In order to better rationalize Haskett’s regular presence in his home,
Waythorn “had to accept him as a lien on the property” (448). The language here
foregrounds Alice as a damaged commodity, encumbered by obligation and in debt to a
previous owner. Waythorn appears to “buy” Alice at a loss, which turns into an attempt
to re-establish his prowess by absorbing a financially risky purchase. Waythorn
“compared himself to a member of a syndicate. He held so many shares in his wife’s
personality and his predecessors were his partners in business” (449). So, not only is Alice
used property, but Haskett and Varick are entitled to the dividends she might still yield.
15
While Alice’s former husbands trigger Waythorn’s anxiety, their presence elicits curiosity
on the New York social scene. As the narrator notes, “some experimental spirits could not
resist the diversion of throwing Varick and his former wife together, and there were
those who thought he found a zest in the propinquity” (449). Propinquity, of course,
suggests kinship as well as proximity and legitimizes Waythorn’s constant interactions
with Haskett and Varick, easing Waythorn’s resistance as he too, “had drifted into a
dulling propinquity with Haskett and Varick and he took refuge in the cheap revenge of
satirising the situation” (450). The kinship and proximity with the former husbands allow
Waythorn to re-imagine Alice’s worth on the basis of her sexual experience: “he knew
exactly to what training she owed her skill. He even tried to trace the source of his
obligations […] Varick’s liberal construction of the marriage bond had taught her to value
the conjugal virtues; so he was directly indebted to his predecessors for the devotion
which made his life easy if not inspiring” (450). The debt Waythorn values is one that
presumably brings him pleasure as Alice has learned these “wifely arts.” As Papke argues,
“Waythorn is continually and disconcertingly thrust into the company of the other two
husbands. At first, he mentally belittles his wife for too openly appearing as used goods
[…]. At the conclusion, however, Waythorn has managed to rationalize a means of profitmaking from his partner’s work” (116-117). This re-assessment symbolically allows
Waythorn to revisit earlier manifestations of his anxiety: his “sudden exclamation” (440)
when Alice adds cognac to his coffee and his jealousy about the pearl necklace Varick had
given her and which “at Waythorn’s insistence had been returned before her marriage”
(443). Clearly, his acceptance of Alice’s former husbands is due to the passage of time,
which “dulled the irony of the situation” (450).
16
If Waythorn has adjusted, what is the meaning of his laughter at the end of the story,
after each of Alice’s husbands has presented himself before her in the library? While the
text provides no final explanation for Waythorn’s reaction, the laugh might be used as a
commentary on his original aversion, recognizing that “he had fancied that a woman can
shed her past like a man. But now he saw that Alice was bound to hers both by the
circumstances which forced her into continued relation with it, and by the traces it had
left on her nature” (449). And while he condemns Alice for these complicated and
intertwined ties, they reassert themselves as that which had initially drawn him to her in
the first place, thus re-establishing her worth insofar as they make her a rare commodity.
She becomes a rare object, in other words, whose scarcity is the source of an increase in
her value. However, the terms according to which value is determined are established by
men, and it is men who do the dealing.
Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012
6
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “P...
17
If humor reassures Waythorn that his fears are unfounded, no such enlightenment occurs
for Charlotte in “Pomegranate Seed.” Nowhere is Charlotte’s insistence on the accuracy
and truth of her assumptions more powerful than in the second section, where the arrival
of the eighth grey letter prompts her to realize that “she knew she would have no peace
till she found out what was written on that sheet” (684). Rather than open the letter, she
leaves it for her husband to open while she hides in his library so she can “see what
happened between him and the letter when they thought themselves unobserved” (685).
By anthropomorphizing the letter, Charlotte falls back on a ready-made script of the
betrayed wife, thus justifying her detective and prosecutorial techniques. With her
husband’s arrival, the text continues its critique of Charlotte’s actions and her seeming
inability to accurately determine what her husband does, and includes statements such as
“he must have re-read [the letter] a dozen times—or so it seemed to the woman
breathlessly watching him,” or with Kenneth’s back to Charlotte “he raised the letter still
closer to his eyes, as though he had not fully deciphered it. Then he lowered his head, and
she saw his lips touch the sheet,” and finally once face-to-face with each other, “Charlotte
noticed how quickly he had regained his self-control; his profession had trained him to
rapid mastery of face and voice” (686). These descriptions cast doubt on Charlotte’s
actions and the conclusions she draws from them, ironically undermining the story she
crafts and her ability to write, narrate, and interpret it.
18
Charlotte’s inability to interpret evidence and context intensifies during her ensuing
conversation with Kenneth, which occurs in the late Mrs. Ashby’s drawing room. While
Charlotte demands prompt answers to her questions, Kenneth insists that she embrace
ambiguity, meeting her queries with responses like “not now—not yet” (695), which only
fuel Charlotte’s “passionate need to feel herself the sovereign even of his past” (683) and
compels her to insist on their leaving all persons, places, and things familiar. Rather than
draw Kenneth closer to her, Charlotte’s ultimatum drives him away. That the drawingroom is the setting reinforces two points: Charlotte’s proprietary grip on Kenneth is from
another era and produces suffocation and the room symbolically suggests that Kenneth is
still husband to both wives.
19
Charlotte’s delusions about her own power persist in the fourth section; everything in
this section underscores the extent to which Charlotte either imagines acts occurring
that “prove” Kenneth’s love and faithful devotion to her only, or she receives secondhand information about Kenneth and their future. Charlotte unwittingly lays the groundwork for Kenneth’s Persephone-like departure—focusing not on his return to her at some
future point in time, but emphasizing, instead, the extent to which Kenneth is
permanently lost to her. Central to Charlotte’s difficulties at the end of the short story is
the extent to which the letters and the reversal of the Persephone myth call attention to
her fundamental inability to live with ambiguity. In other words, what the letters and the
myth share is the recognition that language and relationships are not fixed entities but
are constructions where meaning is constantly negotiated. Charlotte’s binary thought
process is what also links her to her mother-in-law whose “astringent bluntness of speech
responded to the forthright and simple in Charlotte’s own nature” (692). This bond
solidifies early in the relationship when the elder Mrs. Ashby notices the removal of
Elsie’s portrait, which leads her to praise Charlotte and reminds her not to put it back.
“Two’s company,” she says (692). At the same time, both women oversimplify Elsie in
their assumption that the removal of her portrait somehow negates her presence. Their
joint fear of Elsie’s unseen power serves as a metaphor for their discomfort with the
Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012
7
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “P...
liminal in general: “how safe and familiar it all looked; and out there, somewhere in the
uncertainty and mystery of the night, lurked the answer to the two women’s conjectures,
like an indistinguishable figure prowling on the threshold” (702). It is ironic, then, that
Charlotte arrives at the conclusion that the handwriting in the letter is Elsie’s at the very
moment when the elder “Mrs. Ashby looked up, her eyes […] lifted to the blank wall
behind her son’s writing table” (707) where Elsie’s portrait once hung. Charlotte uses the
blank wall—or Elsie’s absence—to confirm her presence. This is also the case when she
tries to read the ninth grey letter: Charlotte attempts to read what is not there and in
doing so imposes her fears on the page, which then serves as evidence that Elsie has
summoned Kenneth to her side, leaving Charlotte alone with her mother-in-law to
contemplate her defeat.
20
The conclusion of the story begs the question: why is Kenneth’s departure framed in the
Persephone myth? And if his departure broadens the definition of marriage, why is this
act left undeveloped? Readers familiar with the myth, in which the maiden’s hunger for
forbidden fruit permanently binds her to the underworld for several months of the year,
will see how the myth changes in Wharton’s story: Wharton not only casts the figure as
male, but also represents the departure as a matter of choice. Because Charlotte
interprets events in terms of either/or, a binary thought process that the text as a whole
rejects, to represent Kenneth’s departure more fully would be counter-productive.
Instead, readers are literally left with his blank page in which they must negotiate the
terms of this new and more open marital union. This conforms with Wharton’s vision of
her ghost stories: “when I first began to write ghost stories, I was conscious of a common
medium between myself and my readers […] of their meeting me half way among the
primeval shadows, and filling in the gaps in my narrative with sensations and divinations
akin to my own” (Ghosts viii). In their analysis of her preface, Carol Singley and Susan
Elizabeth Sweeney emphasize that Wharton “literally represents the act of reading as
peering in an almost blank page, filling in gaps, absences, [and] ellipses[,] defin[ing]
reading as the production of meaning rather than the discovery of truth” (189). In many
ways, Charlotte’s inability to read the ninth letter “establishes it as a floating signifier,
which creates shifting relationships among the characters who attempt to appropriate it
and discover its meaning” (Singley and Sweeney 182). Charlotte’s ambiguity-induced
anxiety leads her to re-establish her rightful place as Kenneth’s wife by following her
mother-in-law’s advice to call the police. What is most telling in this final moment is the
call is not placed, and any enforcement of the “law” that Charlotte seeks never occurs.
21
From the juxtaposition of “The Other Two” and “Pomegranate Seed” emerges the gradual
embrace of ambiguity. As her characters negotiate and re-interpret the conventions of
marriage, Wharton helps readers to examine and question them. In Wharton’s later story,
however, this modern approach to marriage eludes Charlotte, and the reader is
compelled to recognize her confinement within convention itself. Equally haunted by his
spouse’s past, Waythorn emerges far more successfully than Charlotte simply because he
understands that it is impossible to shed one’s past. The story’s final scene depicts Alice
in communion with three husbands—none of whom claim sole possessorship—who
content themselves with “shares” of Alice Haskett Varick Waythorn. In these texts and
others, Wharton anticipates the modern consequences of multiple marriages, revealing
that these unions—much like language itself—are predicated upon negotiation between
and among the participants.
Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012
8
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “P...
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beer, Janet and Avril Horner. “ ‘This Isn’t Exactly a Ghost Story’: Edith Wharton and Parodic
Gothic.” Journal of American Studies. 37:2 (August 2003): 269-285.
Kiran-Raw, Melteux. “Edith Wharton’s ‘The Other Two.’” The Explicator 68:1 (2010): 39-42.
Papke, Mary. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. Westport and
London: Greenwood P, 1990.
Singley, Carol and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. “Forbidden Reading and Ghostly Writing: Anxious
Power in Wharton’s ‘Pomegranate Seed.’” Women’s Studies 20 (1991): 177-203.
Veblen, Thorstein. Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
Waid, Candace. Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld. Chapel Hill and London: U of North
Carolina P, 1991.
Wharton, Edith and Ogden Codman, Jr. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1897.
Wharton, Edith. Ghosts. New York: Appleton-Century, 1937.
---. “Pomegranate Seed.” Collected Stories 1911-1937. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of
America, 2001.
---. “The Other Two.” Collected Stories 1891-1910. Ed. Maureen Howard. New York: Library of
America, 2001.
NOTES
1. For a discussion of Wharton’s appropriation of the Gothic for the purpose of parody, see Janet
Beer and Avril Horner’s “ ‘This Isn’t Exactly a Ghost Story’: Edith Wharton and Parodic Gothic.”
While the article does not address “Pomegranate Seed,” its invocation of Linda Hutcheon’s
approach to parody is a salient point insofar as “parody can either be used at the expense of the
original text’s ideology or it can hold ideology up as an ethical standard. From this point of view,
parody acts as a consciousness-raising device, preventing the acceptance of the narrow,
doctrinaire, dogmatic views of any particular ideological group” (280).
ABSTRACTS
Dans les nouvelles d’Edith Wharton, la conduite des personnages féminins est soumise à des
critères qui ne s’appliquent pas aux personnages masculins. Dans « The Other Two » (1904), Alice
Waythorn, qui a divorcé deux fois, est l’objet d’un certain mépris. C’est le troisième mari d’Alice
Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012
9
Old Entanglements: Spectral Spouses in Edith Wharton’s “The Other Two” and “P...
qui a le pouvoir de décider si elle sera ou non acceptée par la société. Si la capacité d’adaptation
de sa femme est précisément ce qu’il apprécie en elle, il n’en est pas moins vrai que c’est à lui que
revient le pouvoir de porter un jugement sur elle. Le sourire de Waythorn à la fin de la nouvelle
laisse deviner un nouvel ordre social dans lequel la possibilité pour une femme d’oublier son
passé est directement liée à la capacité qu’a ou non son mari de l’ignorer. Dans « Pomegranate
Seed » (1931), Mrs. Ashby exerce son pouvoir par-delà la mort en adressant à son mari des lettres
qui déterminent l’issue du deuxième mariage de Mr. Ashby. La nouvelle laisse entendre que
Kenneth Ashby a du mal à se libérer de son passé pour nouer une relation nouvelle et l’invocation
de Perséphone semble indiquer qu’il sera, d’une certaine manière, marié à deux femmes en
même temps. C’est la définition même du mariage qui est remise en question dans ces deux
récits.
AUTHORS
GINA ROSSETTI
Gina M. Rossetti is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Foreign
Languages at Saint Xavier University. Her expertise is in American literature after the Civil War
and before World War I with a special emphasis on American literary naturalism. Professor
Rossetti has published a book entitled Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature
(U of Missouri, 2006), and numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews. She is an Advisory
Board member for the Jack London Society and is the Area Chair for Jack London Studies at the
Popular Culture Association Conference.
Journal of the Short Story in English, 58 | 2012
10